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a conservative, it is with utmost diffidence that I call on the
U.S. government to increase its funding of anything at all,
but here is a worthy cause that I think needs more money, and it
is in the nature of the cause that the money required can only come
from the federal government. Bear with me, please.
Like the rest of you, I have friends that I communicate with only
at Christmas. These are old friends back in England. When I take
a trip over there I try to find time to see them, but I don't always
make it. In between times, we exchange Christmas cards, with a few
lines to bring each other up to date with family developments.
The particular person involved here is a woman I have known since
just-out-of-college days. I shall hide her behind the name "Amanda,"
which has no letter in common with her actual name. Amanda was,
I have heard, a fierce leftist at college — a socialist, feminist,
pacifist. Then, a couple of years after graduation, just when I
first knew her, she fell for a guy and married him. "May your first
child be a male child," I growled at the wedding, doing my Luca
Brasi impression. It was, and so was the second. The older of these
two boys is now 14. Well, the news this Christmas was that this
boy has got into a very good secondary school. It is a state school,
not private, but boys-only and with really good academic standing.
(NB: Practically all the best schools in Britain are single-sex.
Hardly any British people really believe that kids can learn anything
in a co-ed environment. They are, of course, quite right. The evidence
is in the "league tables" of British schools nationwide, published
by that country's Department of Education, based on results in standard
examinations. In the league tables for 2000, for the "advanced level"
exams, taken at age 17 plus, the top 20 schools broke down as follows:
11 girls-only, 6 boys-only, 3 mixed. Four
out of the five top-ranked schools were girls-only schools.
Yes, yes, I know there is a case for co-ed secondary schools:
But it sure doesn't have much to do with academic attainment.)
Anyway, the punch line was, that this wonderful new school that
Amanda's son has got into has a CCF! Which the boy has joined! And
he loves it! Now let me explain about CCF.
CCF stand for "Combined Cadet Force," the British equivalent of
Junior ROTC. In my own schooldays every decent boys' school had
a CCF contingent. In some schools it was compulsory. That was not
the case at my own school, and there was no pressure to join. I
think about one in five of us were in the CCF. Starting at age 12,
we mustered every Thursday evening for a parade. We all had uniforms
and boots and were expected to be well turned out. There was an
hour or so of drill, then a half-hour's instruction in range-finding,
weapons care, or some such. On lucky days we'd get an Army movie
showing, in grisly dare-you-to-look detail, why one should not take
live munitions home to use as fireplace ornaments, a thing British
soldiers are apparently fond of doing if not shocked out of the
habit.
Three times a year we had "field days," when we would go out into
the countryside and stage mock battles. This was royal fun. We were
issued rifles for the purpose — the school had a good armory
— and half a dozen blank rounds. It was a point of honor to
fire at least one of your blanks into a cow pat when the officers
weren't looking.
When you got to the senior school, at age 16, you could be a bren-carrier
for your platoon. This was really exciting. The bren is a light
machine gun, and for training purposes was issued with "bulleted
blanks" for automatic firing. A machine gun won't fire on automatic
with a regular blank, because it is the pressure of the expanding
gas behind the bullet as it travels up the barrel that drives the
mechanism to bring the next round into the breech. So they give
you rounds fitted with a wooden bullet, and a baffle that fits over
the muzzle of the gun to shatter the round as it emerges, sending
the splinters flying sideways in a harmless shower. I hope I will
not be accused of inciting any horrid crimes if I tell you that
it is very thrilling, at age 16, to fire off an automatic weapon
at your classmates as they try to storm your position. (As a matter
of fact, the best of all shoot-up-the-school movies, Lindsay Anderson's
1969 If, includes a CCF field-day sequence.)
And, oh, there were vacation camps at regular army bases, and range
courses where you learned to shoot at 200 or even 500 yards, and
"arduous-training" courses, where regular Army PT instructors did
their best to kill you with 30-mile mountain hikes in the pouring
rain, and a lot of other fun stuff. CCF was great, and I enjoyed
it. There were air and naval companies, too. The air cadets were
taught to fly — not a bad deal, getting a pilot's license at
age 17 as part of your state-funded education.
Now, I had supposed that CCF went the way of other features of my
schooldays: men's hats, pop songs you could sing, smoking on buses,
black and white TV. No: It's still there, and in fact making a comeback,
as Amanda's letter revealed.
OK, here's my point. If Amanda, a hard-core 1970s leftist-pacifist,
could be whooping with pleasure at the thought of her son being
in CCF, there must be a lot of other Moms and Dads who'd like the
same thing for their sons. (And in some cases, no doubt, their daughters…but
let's not complicate the issue at this point.) If folk feel that
way across the pond, a lot of folk probably feel that way over here,
too. And why not? Why — unless you are a committed pacifist,
in which case good luck to you and please stop reading — why
would you not want your kids to experience the kind of structure,
challenge, and character-building that comes with a little basic
military training?
The U.S. equivalent to CCF is Junior ROTC. So far as I can judge,
it is a going concern, but not, at least up here in the North East,
a very thriving one. To judge from their website,
there seems to be only one high-school JROTC contingent here on
Long Island (excluding New York City), a region with dozens of high
schools. Now, we hear a lot, especially from military people, about
the great disconnect between the military and the rest of society.
It's not healthy. It's especially not healthy in the U.S.A., whose
oldest and best soldiering tradition is that of the citizens' militias.
Well, here is a way to close the gap a little, while at the same
time enthusing (if my friend Amanda is representative of anything)
a lot of Moms and Dads, giving the kids some solid character training
— not to mention FUN — and helping to spread military
values, which are part of the core values of any civilized nation.
Try John Ruskin, who knew a thing or two about art: "No great art
ever yet rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers."
It could hardly cost much. We used to learn a lot and enjoy ourselves
with what I now know was mostly cast-off stuff from the regular
army. Our battledress uniforms were the style before last, our rifles
the old Lee Enfield. The bren itself had long since disappeared
from the regular army. (A pity: It's a fine weapon, when it doesn't
jam.) We still used the WW2 Infantry Training Manual, the
one that opens with Montgomery's famous assertion that: "The task
of the infantry is to find the enemy and kill him." We didn't know
everything was second-hand, and we wouldn't have cared. The most
basic military equipment — tents, packs, boots, rifles —
doesn't change much, anyway.
So there is my plea, Mr. Secretary of Defense. Let's put some resources
into JROTC. It is cheap, good for the kids, attractive to parents,
and civilizing and unifying for our society. Why would we not
do this?
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